Re: LOGO-L> MicroWorlds in Elementary School

[Peter Tomcsanyi <tomcsany@internet.sk>]

At 10:32 18.2.1998 -0500, Beth Green wrote:
>I'm a new MicroWorlds user trying to get started with a Gr 3 class.
>I've been asking them to write their names using the turtle and logo.
>This question is undoubtedly a beginner's but if they make a mistake,
>how can they eliminate from the code and the graphic just the last move
>that was wrong? In other words, how can they fix their mistake without
>starting again?
>
>	Beth Green

Beth,

When I read your mail, I explained it to my wife Monika. She is teaching 10
to 14 years old pupils using Logo. In our country it is grade 5 to 8. I do
not know how old pupils are Gr 3, but maybe you can think about the methods
my wife reccommends.

In the Logo she is using (Comenius Logo), there is a History window which
stores all the commands written to the Text screen (let's say that it is an
equivalent of the MW command center) and executed . The pupil can then show
the Histroy window, copy a part of its content to the clipboard and paste
it to the Text screen - this executes all the commands once again. This is
not a direct solution of the problem, but it helps a lot when a mistake
occurs and the pupil has to redo things once more.

In MicroWorlds the history of commands is directly accessible in the
Command center, just there is no simple mean to repeat a big part of them
just with one click or push (at least I do not know how).

I tried to implement a small project which would read Logo commands,
execute them (using the RUN primitive) and store them internally, so that
it can delete the last line and re-execute the stored command if needed.
But it seems to me (at least according to the Help comming with the trial
version of MW2) that there are no textbox-oriented input commands (like
readlist or readword) in MW2.

So finally we tried (in MicroWorlds 2 for Win95) this:
Create a textbox named TEXT1 on the left side of the page, which is about
15 characters wide and its height is nearly equal to the height of the
whole page.
Create a button (Do It: once) somewhere near the textbox and put these
commands to it:
cg run text1
Then your pupils can write their commands to the textbox and whenever they
push the button their instructions are executed. If they do not like the
result, they can delete some line(s) in the textbox, add something and try
again.

Maybe this goes a little bit beyond using direct commands towards creating
procedures, but maybe it can help to you.

Or somebody can implement the project which reads, executes and stores
commands in MW.

Regards

Peter Tomcsanyi

My favourite Logo:
http://logo.die.fmph.uniba.sk/logo/
http://www.logo.com/catalogue/titles/superlogo/index.html

---------------------------------------------------------------
Please post messages to the Logo forum to logo-l@gsn.org.  Mail
questions about the list administration to logofdn@gsn.org.  To
unsubscribe send    unsubscribe logo-l    to majordomo@gsn.org.